A Companion to British and Irish Cinema

John Hill, John Hill

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781118482834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

A stimulating overview of the intellectual arguments and critical debates involved in the study of British and Irish cinemas

British and Irish film studies have expanded in scope and depth in recent years, prompting a growing number of critical debates on how these cinemas are analysed, contextualized, and understood. A Companion to British and Irish Cinema addresses arguments surrounding film historiography, methods of textual analysis, critical judgments, and the social and economic contexts that are central to the study of these cinemas. Twenty-nine essays from many of the most prominent writers in the field examine how British and Irish cinema have been discussed, the concepts and methods used to interpret and understand British and Irish films, and the defining issues and debates at the heart of British and Irish cinema studies.

Offering a broad scope of commentary, the Companion explores historical, cultural and aesthetic questions that encompass over a century of British and Irish film studies—from the early years of the silent era to the present-day. Divided into five sections, the Companion discusses the social and cultural forces shaping British and Irish cinema during different periods, the contexts in which films are produced, distributed and exhibited, the genres and styles that have been adopted by British and Irish films, issues of representation and identity, and debates on concepts of national cinema at a time when ideas of what constitutes both 'British' and 'Irish' cinema are under question.

A Companion to British and Irish Cinema is a valuable and timely resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of film, media, and cultural studies, and for those seeking contemporary commentary on the cinemas of Britain and Ireland.

Part I
Histories: Issues and Debates

1
British Silent Cinema

Jon Burrows

Introduction

Trying to establish even a very basic summary of key facts and events in the history of silent cinema in Britain, one is confronted with historiographical controversies and ambiguities at every turn. It was at one time an orthodox stance to claim that the first truly viable moving image camera and projector was invented in Britain by William Friese Greene (e.g. Allister 1948); a monument erected at his grave in Highgate Cemetery calls him ‘The Inventor of Kinematography’, and The Magic Box, an expensive feature‐length Technicolor biopic celebrating Friese‐Greene's ‘achievements’, was produced for the Festival of Britain in 1951 (Figure 1.1). Following a comprehensive critique of the merits and practical feasibility of Friese Greene's patents (Coe 1969a, b, c) this presumption has now come to seem ridiculous, but chronicling the introduction of cinematography in Britain is still not straightforward. It has become canonical practice to date the birth of cinema in Britain to 20 or 21 February 1896, which were the dates of the first public performances of the Lumière Cinématographe at the Polytechnic in London's Upper Regent Street for – respectively – an invited group of journalists and then the first paying audience. The compilers of reference works do not appear to have noticed an essay published in 1996 to coincide with the official centenary of cinema in Britain, which convincingly argued that a successful demonstration by Birt Acres of his own projector to the Lyonsdown Photographic Club on 10 January 1896 should be recognised as Britain's first public film screening (Brown 1996).

Figure 1.1 Robert Donat as William Friese‐Greene in The Magic Box (1951).

There is no small matter of controversy involved in choosing to celebrate the first instances of film projection as the birth of the cinema. Before the publication of Gordon Hendricks's ground‐breaking work on Thomas Edison (1961), most film historians seem to have been unaware that the Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewing cabinet developed by the Edison Company in New Jersey were photographic moving image technologies which used 35 mm celluloid film. One might consequently argue that the history of cinematography in Britain was effectively launched when two Americans, Franck Z. Maguire and Joseph D. Baucus, opened a Kinetoscope parlour in London's Oxford Street to the public on 17 October 1894. The Kinetoscope was illicitly replicated by Robert W. Paul later the same year, and by March 1895 Paul and/or Birt Acres (both claimed sole credit) had managed to reverse engineer a moving image camera similar to Edison's Kinetograph and shoot the first British 35 mm films.

Until 1908, moving image entertainment in Britain was effectively an adjunct to the music hall and fairground industries. Long film shows were strictly the domain of travelling showmen and dedicated fixed‐site ‘cinemas’ were very few and far between outside of London. This essentially replicates the pattern of development experienced throughout the western world, though it is an under‐explained peculiarity that the emergence of significant numbers of cinemas in Britain occurred three years later than was the case in America, France, and Germany. A cinema investment boom did not gain momentum in the UK until late 1909. The synchronicity here with the passing into law of a piece of national legislation (the 1909 Cinematograph Act) enforcing safety regulations at film screenings appears to be more than coincidental; the establishment of a standardised licensing system seems to have directly stimulated confidence in the sector (Burrows 2004a, pp. 69–71, 82–84). An intensive phase of cinema building ensued in the short period leading up to the First World War, although the precise scale of growth has never been reliably established. Estimates of the number of cinemas operating in Britain by the end of 1914 have ranged from 3500 (Low 1949, p. 23) to 5000 (Hiley 2002, p. 121).

The cinema was thus established as a medium of mass entertainment in Britain by the early 1910s, but it is a striking fact that in the present day there is very little knowledge of, or familiarity with, silent British films, directors, and stars among the general public and even many cinephiles. A 1995 documentary – Typically British: A Personal History of British Cinema by Stephen Frears – commissioned from one of the country's leading contemporary directors by the British Film Institute, to celebrate the centenary of cinema, straightforwardly concluded that ‘To all intents and purposes there'd been no silent film industry in Britain’.

Scholarship dedicated to rectifying this collective lacuna is not, however, a recent phenomenon, and any reflection on the study of British silent cinema must engage in some way with an ‘official’ four‐volume history of the subject written by Rachael Low, which was originally commissioned in the late 1940s by the newly established British Film Academy (known today as the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, BAFTA) and subsequently supported by the British Film Institute over the following four decades (see Nowell‐Smith 2012, pp. 26–27). There will be numerous observations made in various parts of this commentary concerning the strengths and limitations of this undertaking – still the standard reference work on the topic, and twice republished. But it should first of all be noted that the basic organisation of the text which follows is itself a direct legacy of Low's project. Low identified distinct chronological phases of development of the British film industry that she felt merited study in separate volumes: 1896–1906; 1906–1914; 1914–1918; 1918–1929. This periodisation was very astute, and continues to be widely regarded as useful and important. The equivalent multi‐volume history of American cinema, published from 1990 onwards, elected to carve up the silent era in much the same way (albeit without a separate study covering the First World War). Moreover, Low's divisions essentially correspond to the timeframes subsequently associated with some of the most influential critical concepts used to categorise different stages of early film history, e.g. the ‘cinema of attractions’, ‘transitional cinema’, ‘classical cinema’.

This chapter will consider the critical study of silent British cinema in three sections, first covering work which predominantly addresses the 1894–1906 period, then the 1907–1918 period, and, finally, 1918–1929. It is by no means the case that these boundaries are always studiously respected and maintained. A lot of scholarship in the field has been published as part of anthologies (typically consisting in the main of conference proceedings) which address specific themed issues across the entire range of British silent film history (e.g. Burton and Porter 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003; Higson 2002; Brown and Davison 2013). Some articles and monographs not only cover more than one of these periods but also claim important continuities between them (e.g. Kember 2009). Nonetheless, the silent era witnessed a series of particularly dramatic evolutionary changes at the level of film form and also fundamental structural transformations of its industrial organisation, and there are consequently distinct issues and methodologies that have predominated in respective debates about these three sub‐periods.

1894–1906

There is a strong case for arguing that British cinema has never been as internationally prominent, successful, and influential as it was between 1900 and 1906. Surviving British films from this period frequently stand out – in formal terms – as highly innovative and sophisticated in comparison with their French and American peers. One particularly systematic and meticulous analyst of the global development of filmmaking styles has noted that ‘at the beginning of the [twentieth] century the work of British filmmakers was important in a way that was not to be the case again for thirty years’ (Salt 1978, p. 149). This claim has been frequently echoed: ‘Seldom if ever again would British film‐makers make so substantial a creative contribution to world cinema,’ writes Richard Maltby (1997, p. xi). Recognition by contemporaries of the quality of early British film production is evidenced by the extent to which it was often directly imitated. The Brighton‐based filmmaker G.A. Smith, for example, has been credited with having ‘played an essential role in the early evolution of the edited film in Europe and America’ (Gray 2004, p. 51). Even The Great Train Robbery (1903), that most iconic of American films of the early 1900s, is acknowledged by one of the leading historians of early American cinema to have been heavily influenced by A Daring Daylight Burglary, produced earlier in the same year by the Mottershaw company of Sheffield (Musser 1991, p. 256). The legendary French film historian Georges Sadoul declared in the 1940s that, in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Histories
• Part II: Critical Approaches
• Part III: Critical Approaches
• Part IV: Representation and Identity
• Part V: Redefining ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ Cinemas
• Index
• End User License Agreement